Basically, widely reported Airtable's 2026 reported ARR was close to $500M. they sold at a ~3x multiple assuming it went flat/down~~. They had raised $1.4B (total latest around 770M) in funding I am not sure for what?? and had ~1B in cash (according to some online sources)??
Now I have no idea what this is even about, maybe all investors wanted out?
My (semi-educated) guess: it's about the quality, not quantity, of that revenue. If I opened their books, I expect to see lots of SMB customers with low deal sizes and non-trivial churn, non-sticky product usage, not many large enterprises signing up, and low NRR. Add a high customer acquisition cost in an undifferentiated space to complete the picture.
I didn't understand why a CRUD app (yes, with lots of integrations and bells and whistles) would need to raise more $1B+. I think most of that went into GTM, not into product development.
(Addition: Airtable had $900M in the bank at the time of acquisition so they spent "only" $400M, but still, my guess is that a lot of that went into GTM.)
People are reacting like Bending Spoons is going to make Airtable worse, whereas in fact being acquired by bending spoons is already the indicated of things being worse than ever. Which may be a little premature for Airtable but definitely not unexpected.
As to what will bending spoons do with it - does anyone know (or care) what did they do with Evernote, or AOL?
Airtable felt stuck for a long before that, now is just the moment to remind ourselves not to be stuck with it.
Bending Spoons strategy can be summarized in the following plan:
- Make offers so low that - if anyone were to accept the deal, they're desperate/greedy enough to take it
- hike price and limit features
- people who do not have the capacity to switch will bear the cost
- bleed out remaining customers
If it works, it works. They're basically betting against the amount of business depth that exists in the world
Super silly of me to ask but how does Bending Spoons make money in all of this?
Is it the "fire all American devs and save costs with cheaper Italians" schtick or is there something else?
They look for companies which got fat on free money with impossible valuations which are dead ducks. The free money period ended so they can't raise more money and if they do it will be a substantial down valuation so investors won't approve it as it would cristalise a loss on their portfolio.
These companies all pay insanely high silicon valley wages and deliver very little actual product development velocity for the wage costs involved.
The founders don't have the b**s to do the necessary haircuts themselves so they sell. Bending spoons takes the reputation hit that the founder should have taken and makes severe cuts.
BS then rationalises the roadmap, and either keeps it alive or invests into it depending on expected return.
Nothing particularly revolutionary other than they are an execution machine.
Find product that users like and can be difficult to switch away from, cut operating costs to the bone, and jack up prices. Ideally the money you extract from the remaining customers pays for the acquisition plus generates a profit. Someone in a previous thread compared it to a perpetual bond with fluctuating payouts or a royalty stream, the discounted future earnings eventually converge to 0.
Feels like the founding team is moving on to a different product entirely, they were building something called hyperagent and focusing all of their efforts on
I have a lot of personal stuff in Airtable. It's really nice software but the company has struggled. Omni, their AI agent was terrible, and yet the founders have doubled down on agents with Hyperagents (nee Superagents).
I'm sure Notion DBs ate their lunch, but Coda had the best document database integration I've seen, but they got bought by Superhuman.
This entire market space is going to be messy for a while.
Coda got acquired by Grammarly who then installed Shishir Mehrotra (Coda CEO) as CEO of Grammarly. They then acquired Superhuman Mail and renamed the whole thing Superhuman. They also acquired Rows to bring a formal spreadsheet into the mix to add to their Coda tables and productivity suite. (Well played.)
I was very surprised to see Airtable sold for reportedly less than what they raised and had assumed AI tailwinds (easy database GUI) would benefit them well. Presumably, this was insufficient to overcome enterprise revenue headwinds and a chilly SaaS financing market.
I do wonder how this might have played differently had their product and API been better engineered as a database for developers through faster read/write and data scale... unnecessary in PLG-focused pre-AI world, but an interesting avenue for agentic growth nonetheless.
Tough break for the Airtable team. It was a great product and I have recommended it often to small business owners over the years.
Bummer. Airtable's a killer product and I've been using and evangelizing it for nearly 10 years at this point. Built whole side projects around it (and its API), plus organized a ton of personal information. I've made some custom integrations too which have just kept working without maintenance for years. I've got fairly regular backups of all my data, but still. Hurts my heart a little.
Best case scenario it keeps working without totally jacking up the prices. But also starting to think about long-term alternatives. BaseRow seems reasonable, as does spinning all of my many bases into a single big Django monolith (something I've had in the back of my head for while anyway). But it's been nice not having to micro manage this service. Pretty good mobile app, too. Enjoyed it while it lasted, I guess!
>"Based in Milan, the company acquires products with existing product‑market fit[4][5] (such as AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, komoot, Meetup, Tractive, Vimeo, and WeTransfer) and manages them for long-term ownership, often increasing revenue and lowering expenses (including by reducing headcount).[6][7] The company employs full-stack developers to rewrite acquired codebases using artificial intelligence, proprietary platform tools, and open-source software (often Python, FastAPI, and TypeScript).[8][9]"
Ah!
So they're kind of the equivalent of a
special kind of Private Equity firm
that specifically purchases/manages/improves: Commerical websites, Apps, SaaS'es and other Digital/Software products that already have many users/customers (aka "Product-Market Fit" in business parlance...)
Although, arguably, Microsoft, while never called a "Private Equity" firm, sort of did all of that first, with other tech companies, in earlier decades!
Well, wait a second now...
If memory serves me, then actually Computer Associates did all of that (for software mostly for the Mainframe / Minicomputer markets and related!) even earlier than Microsoft, probably about a decade or so earlier than Microsoft!
41 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 49.3 ms ] threadBasically, widely reported Airtable's 2026 reported ARR was close to $500M. they sold at a ~3x multiple assuming it went flat/down~~. They had raised $1.4B (total latest around 770M) in funding I am not sure for what?? and had ~1B in cash (according to some online sources)??
Now I have no idea what this is even about, maybe all investors wanted out?
I didn't understand why a CRUD app (yes, with lots of integrations and bells and whistles) would need to raise more $1B+. I think most of that went into GTM, not into product development.
(Addition: Airtable had $900M in the bank at the time of acquisition so they spent "only" $400M, but still, my guess is that a lot of that went into GTM.)
29€ a month just to host a meetup page with RSVPs.
$270M@5.8B Series E 2021 Mar
$185M@2.6B Series D 2020 Sep
$100M@1.1B Series C 2018 Nov
$52M@152M Series B 2018 Mar
Bending Spoons must have amazing negotiaters to strike such a bargain.
We should send them to Iran to negotiate the peace deal.
I laughed so hard. But I mean seriously...
Airtable felt stuck for a long before that, now is just the moment to remind ourselves not to be stuck with it.
- Make offers so low that - if anyone were to accept the deal, they're desperate/greedy enough to take it - hike price and limit features - people who do not have the capacity to switch will bear the cost - bleed out remaining customers
If it works, it works. They're basically betting against the amount of business depth that exists in the world
I don't see how Airtable makes money on its own.
These companies all pay insanely high silicon valley wages and deliver very little actual product development velocity for the wage costs involved.
The founders don't have the b**s to do the necessary haircuts themselves so they sell. Bending spoons takes the reputation hit that the founder should have taken and makes severe cuts.
BS then rationalises the roadmap, and either keeps it alive or invests into it depending on expected return.
Nothing particularly revolutionary other than they are an execution machine.
The same thing Broadcom is doing with VMware.
2026: Airtable
2025: Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Brightcove, Komoot
2024: WeTransfer, Issuu, Hopin, Meetup, Mosaic Group
2023: Evernote
2022: Filmic Pro
2021: Remini
2018: Splice
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/01/bending-spoons-ipo-pricing
I'm sure Notion DBs ate their lunch, but Coda had the best document database integration I've seen, but they got bought by Superhuman.
This entire market space is going to be messy for a while.
I was very surprised to see Airtable sold for reportedly less than what they raised and had assumed AI tailwinds (easy database GUI) would benefit them well. Presumably, this was insufficient to overcome enterprise revenue headwinds and a chilly SaaS financing market.
I do wonder how this might have played differently had their product and API been better engineered as a database for developers through faster read/write and data scale... unnecessary in PLG-focused pre-AI world, but an interesting avenue for agentic growth nonetheless.
Tough break for the Airtable team. It was a great product and I have recommended it often to small business owners over the years.
What was terrible about it?
Best case scenario it keeps working without totally jacking up the prices. But also starting to think about long-term alternatives. BaseRow seems reasonable, as does spinning all of my many bases into a single big Django monolith (something I've had in the back of my head for while anyway). But it's been nice not having to micro manage this service. Pretty good mobile app, too. Enjoyed it while it lasted, I guess!
Wikipedia:
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons)
>"Based in Milan, the company acquires products with existing product‑market fit[4][5] (such as AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, komoot, Meetup, Tractive, Vimeo, and WeTransfer) and manages them for long-term ownership, often increasing revenue and lowering expenses (including by reducing headcount).[6][7] The company employs full-stack developers to rewrite acquired codebases using artificial intelligence, proprietary platform tools, and open-source software (often Python, FastAPI, and TypeScript).[8][9]"
Ah!
So they're kind of the equivalent of a
special kind of Private Equity firm
that specifically purchases/manages/improves: Commerical websites, Apps, SaaS'es and other Digital/Software products that already have many users/customers (aka "Product-Market Fit" in business parlance...)
Although, arguably, Microsoft, while never called a "Private Equity" firm, sort of did all of that first, with other tech companies, in earlier decades!
Well, wait a second now...
If memory serves me, then actually Computer Associates did all of that (for software mostly for the Mainframe / Minicomputer markets and related!) even earlier than Microsoft, probably about a decade or so earlier than Microsoft!
Anyway, interesting article!